Thursday, January 22, 2009

Memory Of The Garden, The Work

Here's a mythological piece. It's a while after that trouble, but that time is definitely not forgotten...

Memory Of The Garden

I have just eaten.I hear your voice calling meAnd I want to hide.

I thought I got over this Way back, but hearing your callSends shivers through me.

You call, "Where are you, my love?"I answer, "Absent."

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At this time in my life, I've been called to poetry. How can I tell its a call? It's so frickin easy. I wrote five today and I'll bet three stand as is. I revise some of them, like the one that appeared at Breathing Poetry, I revised the last line of that one. Like the two here. Both received revision today to get them into posting condition - final condition.

Even these small revisions are easy, go according to fairly simple rules. If nothing else governs, then simple sentences. If nothing else governs then the active voice. If nothing else governs, avoid participles, even here. But sometimes participles save the syllable count. There are others.

It's so easy for me to write this poetry and that leads to two stories about it. In the dark story I am engaging in something wrong this time around because I have done it so much in other lifetimes. In this story I am regressing, missing the mark, sinning, the sin is sloth, because there are other more difficult tasks that are actually mine to do. I am avoiding.

In the light story I am commanded and the way is made straight through grace. As ever in these matters, I am left to choose between the extremes for the story, the mythology. The activity itself is rather simple like cooking eggs or something. And I do it for the same reason really. I frickin love doing this. So I am called, like my hero, Hafiz. I have decided to choose the light. Occam's razor suggests that the simpler story is the truer story. This is the simpler story, and I sleep better that way.

Like all the other times in my life like this, times that I decide I am called, there is a beginning, a middle, and eventually an end - or rather a new beginning. Sometimes the path is short, sometimes long. I was married twenty years and would be still if it was possible. But we both failed, and then she died. Here I say that being called to an activity is being hired on for road repair.

The Work

Talking to my friendI heard with my other ear.That sparked wordless thoughtOf the oddity of life.

Shards of continuityForce me. I will rushAround gathering pieces,Glue them together.

But not left and right,Not stiff or pliant, deeper,Deep shining places.

Just found your blog via Stone from my heart. Enjoyed my first visit and will return to the old hippie and your poetry that feels like things we have all felt but never put into words like you can. Might sound funny, but it's like seeing a Far Side cartoon and saying "I've been there"...

You're welcome here, Teri. I and my old part Siamese welcome you. Well, I welcome you. I don't think Lynne Redgrave Cat cares that much about human things or people. Mostly she likes her food and her very own parabolic heater.

And you are right some of this poetry has a kind of weird twist to it... ;)

when will you learn to use english Chris? it's "friggin" not "frickin".... with all your other visitors fawning over your poems i wouldn't want you to get a big head...... odd looking marine animals..... oddity of life

No worries, mate. Every night when it's time, I take this head of mine off my shoulders and put it in this shrinking chamber I got on Craig's List. Quite a little gadget, sized just right (that's really important as it is almost impossible to time it right without that) for my normal aize. You might notice I wear hats. If I over shrink then I have to get a whole new group of hats, and that's already happened one time.

The View From The Northern Wall

Some years ago my poetry took on a mythic flavor and I became a character in my own poems, a mage, "the man of the Northern Wall". This apellation is not completely fictional. My middle name is Noordwal, a Dutch term for north wall, though in current Dutch it mainly means north bank as in riverbank. I was told that an ancestor, a Portugese Jew escaping the Inquisition, settled in a small Dutch town and took this name from where he settled, near the north wall of the town. I have thought for a long time that -wal meant wall, think my mother told me that. A linguist might say that my usage is no longer common, is an older usage, but then the Inquisition happened in Portugal a few centuries ago, right around the time the Moors lost control of the Iberian Peninsula and the Jews lost the modest protection given them by Islam. Now I write as this mage, my poetry persona.